There’s a bunch of little improvements that could make eSports friendlier to newcomers and longtime fans right now. But this year, there are also some deeper deficiencies that eSports organizers could stand to address. These are harder to fix because of the way eSports are structured right now, but they should be addressed in the long-run.
Team Liquid is the heart of the StarCraft 2 community. If you want to follow that scene, you hang out at their website, and the chances are that tournament organizers and team managers will bring news and information to Liquid before they even release it via their own websites. Very simply, Team Liquid is the English-language StarCraft scene.
Blizzard All-stars is the developer’s own attempt to usurp Dota 2 and League of Legends; games built upon the success of the original Warcraft 3 Dota mod. Originally named Blizzard DOTA, its name was changed after a legal dispute with Valve over the Dota trademark.
While Valve may now hold the Dota trademark, Blizzard can still lay claim to being the inspiration for the Dota legacy, which stretches back through Warcraft 3 to the original StarCraft and a custom map known as Aeon of Strife. Here’s what we know about their game so far.
The MLG v. Proleague Invitational begins tonight at 12 AM BST / 7 PM Eastern. It is the first tournament featuring many of MLG’s international StarCraft 2 professionals and the Korean eSports Association’s (KeSPA) pro players now joining the world SC2 competitive scene. Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
The second day of StarCraft 2 competition at DreamHack Valencia opened with a largely unsurprising round of 16. Most of the tournament favorites dispatched their opponents to move onto the round of 8, which is ongoing an DreamHack’s Twitch channel.
During a panel about eSports at the Valencia eSports Congress, Dustin Browder, Lead Designer on Starcraft II, was asked whether Blizzard had any plans for free to play in regards to their strategy behemoth. Free to play opens up the game to a huge number of people, and the more people that play, the more likely it is that you’ll unearth talent for your pro eSports scene.
Major League Gaming, the International Esports Group and the Korean Esports Association have teamed together to create an invitational international mega-tournament for Starcraft 2, the MVP (MLG vs ProLeague). It’ll bring together 48 of the best players in SC2 right now, with 24 coming from the Korean ProLeague, along with 12 from the US and 6 from Europe. The final 6 will be from Korea and Taiwan, just not from the ProLeague.
Check your inboxes. Your main one, obviously. But also your backup, and the one that you use just to sign up to services you know you never want to hear anything from. And check that one you made when you were 14 and thought that Judge Dredd was just about the coolest thing on the planet and so ‘DreddLaw69’ would be a good account name.
Wily modders have recreated five of the six Starcraft campaigns within the Starcraft 2 engine. These are complete, faithful recreations of the original Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood Wars singleplayer game, including the original techtrees, dialogue, and even the briefing screens. These first five are available to download and play, and the modders have recently announced work has begun the final Queen of Blades campaign.
In his first ever appearance at the IEM, Mvp, a 21 year old Korean and veteran of the original Starcraft, has taken the win over Nerchio, nabbing himself the pot and demonstrating once more that Korea really does have a monopoly on high end Starcraft 2 play. 
Battle.net suffered a massive security breach last Saturday, August 4, in which encrypted player passwords, a list of global email addresses, answers to personal security question and Authenticator information were all swiped. Blizzard maintain that only North American passwords were accessed, that they're still cryptographically scambled and that they're confident it would be "extremely difficult" to extract the actual password. Either way, if you're a Battle.net user you should change your password immediately, and the passwords of any other accounts that might've shared that password. Mike Morhaime's issued a statement on the Blizzard website, and Blizzard have posted a security FAQ that Battle.net users should probably take a look at.Article submitted by: Tristan
Starcraft has come a long way...
Article submitted by: Joe Jamieson
Quite revelatory.
Article submitted by: Joe Jamieson
Might have to pop along to this and do some probing.
Article submitted by: Tristan
Okay, so as great as this sounds, Sundance (Founder of MLG) has qualified on Twitter that this is only in talks. Fingers crossed everyone.
Article submitted by: Tristan
A rather large victory for E-sports everywhere
Article submitted by: Tristan
One of Blizzards rare promotional offers on Starcraft. If you don't have it there's no better time to buy.
Article submitted by: Tristan
With the recent enhancement to the Queen's range, Zergs in ZvT have been consistently opening with 4 or 5 queens, limiting the ability of a reactor-hellion opener to deny creep spread. This is a great reactionary article from Team-Dignitas.
